Posted tagged ‘NESICAxLIVE’

Arc System Works has released a trailer for their upcoming fighter, Blazblue: Continuum Shift II, where it showcases a few of the new characters that will be joining the roster. Unfortunately the video quality isn’t that great, which is strange since it’s coming directly from the company itself and BBCS2 is an HD title.

We all know about BBCS2 being the essential “launch title” for Taito’s new digital distribution service, NESiCAxLIVE and I’ve found out a few more details as to how that works. If an operator wants NESiCA, they need to purchase a server for 89,000¥ (about $900). Then as I understand it, they can then purchase something like BBCS2 online for a few hundred dollars less than a PCB (ex. BBCS2 is about $2000USD digital, abt $2300 PCB), although you will need Type X2 board to load the software onto. Taito mentions that some services will be free on NESiCA, others will cost a fee and playing a game downloaded via NESiCA is one of those activities that will be fee-based. It’s comparable in this manner to the CoinUp side of the Big buck Hunter games – the game let’s you pick between an online and an offline mode, if the player wants online then the cost of that is higher by a couple of coins. The big question is how will players take to that extra fee on NESiCA?

At the Penny Arcade Expo we saw how a few companies decide to give their games an extra edge by putting their console game into an arcade cabinet. The games which were showcased in such cabinets probably won’t ever see an official release but the understanding that an arcade cabinet attracts attention in a way that a standard kiosk setup does not was certainly highlighted. Now the same idea has moved over to the indie games scene where a small group of independent game developers found a way to grab some attention towards their games at the Fan Expo in Toronto. By using an old arcade cabinet, they converted it to play a number of indie games that were brought to the show and as a result it helped give those games some extra attention them might not have received otherwise. As it turned out, the indie developers got a taste of what an arcade location test can be like, which is different than putting out something like a public online beta. Maybe one of them will consider making an indie arcade title, although that can be a whole new challenge in itself as not everyone makes it there either since you need a way to get the game out there which involves selling hardware in addition to software and that takes funding.

Which takes us on a tangent for a moment, this is where something like Taito’s NESiCAxLIVE digital distribution system could prove useful. It does limit what could be done with the controls which are often one way arcades stand out on their own but it would save a developer from having to build a cabinet, I/O board, PCB and all of that to sell. There are still issues that would need to be resolved for that idea to work everywhere (Taito has the advantage in Japan of having a standard cabinet like Vewlix and clones/variations on that) but I think that something like it could be done elsewhere. Make something like the Neo Geo or Atomiswave, with a standardized cabinet, modular control panels and standard hardware that connects to a robust online delivery system and you could create a new dynamic in the market, which is why I think NESiCA can be a revolution for this industry.

Anyways getting back to the indie games, you can read more about how that event went @ Ars Technica